April 2008

Survey – Complete the April Survey for a chance to win one of 4 prizes!

By actively receiving our monthly newsletter and by participating in our April 2008 newsletter survey we’re offering you the chance to choose your own prize. Your feedback on the STB Suite, usage, and newsletter input will qualify you for the survey prize. The prizes available are a Home Depot gift card, Newegg gift card, 8GB iPod mini, or ½ price SCSItoolbox Suite. The survey is only one page, and should take less than 10 minutes to complete! Your feedback is extremely valuable to us and we’re willing to show you with some great prize options.

Complete the survey by May 15th to be entered into the prize drawing. The winner will be announced in the May STB Newsletter and notified via email or by phone.

Hands-on training with a technical STB expert!Here is a list of some recent customer training sessions that STB has conducted – live, interactive web sessions presented by STB programmers:

Three stages of disk drive screening

How to troubleshoot tape drive problems

RAID issues in disk drive testing

Do you have questions about how to best use the STB Suite in your business? STB is happy to work with you in an interactive “live” environment to help you get the most out of your Toolbox. The cost? If you are a current Performa customer it is free! The commitment? Training sessions run between 30 and 60 minutes.

Ask Dr. SCSI – “Can the SCSItoolbox Suite send a ATA command with a specified transfer length and a timeout set for the command?”

Q. “Can the SCSItoolbox Suite send a ATA command with a specified transfer length and a timeout set for the command?”

A. “In the 7.2 STB Suite release you can specify both the data transfer length and the timeout for any ATA command.

Our program will use the block size reported by the drive during any “standard” read or write I/O’s or tests. So for the majority of test scenarios the block size should be pretty transparent.

In the case of using our ATA/SATA User Defined Commands you will have to enter the data transfer length and data direction in the dialog box – either in the original STB ATA/SATA Commands->User Defined Command dialog, or if you want to issue task register commands during a test sequence using the Disk Manufacturing Module (DMM). Here are screen shots showing these two places where you could issue that type of command:

So as you can see. With the 7.2 release of the SCSItoolbox Suite you can send ATA commands with set transfer lengths and timeout values”

Chart showing how long it will take to write to your entire drive

In our December 2007 newsletter we addressed the very common question of – How long will it take to perform a test on all the drives on my system? We answered the question showing the variables in place for completing the test.

We also wanted to add this simple chart to the answer that shows the transfer rate and time to complete based on drive size.

SCSItoolbox Suite version 7.2 Available for immediate download

The SCSItoolbox Suite version 7.2 is available for immediate download for Active Performa customers. If you have not received your download information already you can contact Jeremy Wolfe to receive your 7.2 upgrade. The feature list as well as the Release notes are available online and here. Release Notes 7.2 | 7.2 Feature List

If you would like to purchase the Performa upgrade for your STB License you can purchase online here: http://www.stbsuite.com/products/performa/ or you can call Jeremy Wolfe at 720.249.2641 or via email sales@scsitoolbox.com.